The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

There is currently a great deal of handwringing as to
whether the PRC will island-build the shoal as a pricetag retaliation if the
Philippines if, as expected, it wins its arbitration case under UNCLOS.

If the PRC proceeds, it would be a pretty big deal,
especially since the PRC never had anything on the atoll previously and would
be sticking a finger in the eye of ASEAN and the Declaration
of Conduct standstill agreement.But never say never.And don’t be
surprised if the PRC is doing some back-channeling to the Philippines at the
same time to offer some carrots with its sticks, like the suggestion recently
floated for non-exclusive traditional fishing rights inside EEZs.

In my opinion, gaming the 2012 “crisis” at the
Scarborough Shoal was a key gambit in the rollout of the pivot.As I write at Asia Times:

Holy
writ for pivoteers is that the PRC seized Scarborough Shoal in 2012, proving
both its duplicity and the futility of bilateral engagement, so the Philippines
had no choice but to internationalize the dispute by taking its South China Sea
issues to binding arbitration under UNCLOS, and the US had no choice but to
insert itself into the South China Sea between an aggressor state and its
helpless victims.

The
reality is that the PRC and the Philippines were successfully negotiating their
differences bilaterally, so successfully in fact that the Philippine Secretary
of Foreign Affairs, Alberto Del Rosario had to step up to sabotage the talks.

In
fact, PRC permanent occupation of the shoal was a consequence, not a cause, of
Philippine internationalization of the dispute.

Today, a growing fear is for China hawks in Washington
and various Asian capitals is that their Scarborough chickens are now, four
years after the fact, in danger of coming home to roost.

If the only concrete outcome of the decision to adopt a
strategy of open confrontation under internationalization is the permanent
alienation to the PRC of the fishing grounds at Scarborough Shoal the whole
UNCLOS process was supposedly designed to secure, people in the Philippines
and, for that matter, governments around the South China Sea are going to ask,
what exactly did this brilliant strategy accomplish?

Alberto Del Rosario’s role as hatchet-man for the
pivot has become extremely difficult to dispute as more facts about the events
of 2012 emerge in the Philippines.The
only murky part—the degree of conspiratorial canoodling between Del Rosario and
pivot pappy Kurt Campbell, at that time Assistant Secretary of State for East
Asian and Pacific Affairs—awaits unraveling by the dogged foreign policy journalists
of the American press.

I have, over the last couple years, expended a certain
amount of righteous spittle to debunk the story floated by the United States in
2014—that the PRC had reneged on a deal negotiated in a Virginia motel room between
Kurt Campbell and PRC Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Fu Ying for a
simultaneous withdrawal from Scarborough Shoal, thereby necessitating the
Philippines’ internationalizing of the dispute, with US moral and military
support becoming more and more overt until today we have the US conducting
joint military exercises with the Philippines on the periphery of the South
China Sea to deter further PRC adventurism.

With typhoon season fast approaching, the
US tried to broker a resolution. By the end of the meeting between Kurt
Campbell, then the top US diplomat for Asia, and Fu Ying, China’s vice foreign
minister for Asia, the US side believed they had an agreement for both sides to
withdraw. The following week, the Philippines ships left the Scarborough Shoal
and returned home. The Chinese, however, stayed in the area.

The
Scarborough Shoal case played a big role in another part of the new approach by
the US and its allies: the appeal to the courts. Albert del Rosario told the FT
that it was the “catalyst” for Manila’s decision to bring China to an
international court over its expansive claims in the South China Sea.

Actually, Kurt Campbell’s one-off
in Virginia collided with an intensive series of 16 negotiations by a
Philippine senator, Antonio Trillanes IV, conducted at the behest of President
Aquino and deliberately bypassing the pro-US China hawk Secretary of Foreign
Affairs, Alberto Del Rosario.

In my Asia Times piece, I also build on my 2014 story to
incorporate some reporting by Rigoberto Tiglao, a Philippine journalist who had
obtained a copy of a four-page Aide Memoire prepared by Trillanes to further
explain his side of the story.It
persuasively describes a concerted effort by Del Rosario to sabotage Trillanes’
negotiations and force the Scarborough process away from a
bilaterally-negotiated resolution of a fisheries dispute to an interminable
festering regional crisis and potential flashpoint for a US-PRC war.

Persuasive enough for Tiglao—who does not present
himself as much of a Trillanes fan—to conclude:

I
believe him when he made one of his particular allegations: that Foreign
Secretary Albert del Rosario deliberately caused the aggravation of our
territorial disputes with China in 2012.

As described in a series
of columns by Tiglao, the Aide Memoire paints a pretty clear
picture of Del Rosario screwing up Trillanes’ Scarborough Shoal deal-- for a
sequential withdrawal, not a simultaneous withdrawal, of Philippine and PRC
vessels--with the help of a phone call from the US.I have bolded some prime bits for emphasis.

“PNoy [President Aquino] directed me to work on the
sequential withdrawal of government ships inside the shoal. However, on the
morning of June 4, PNoy called me to inform me that our BFAR [Bureau of
Fisheries and Aquatic Resources] vessel has already left the shoal but China
reneged on the agreement of simultaneous withdrawal of their ships, so two of
them [were] still inside the shoal.

“I asked him who agreed with what, since I was just
hammering out the details of the sequential withdrawal because the mouth of the shoal was too narrow for a
simultaneous withdrawal. The President told me that Sec. del Rosario told him about the agreement reached in Washington.

“Around 10 June, PNoy informed me that the (remaining BFAR)
vessel was ordered to proceed to Subic to undergo repairs and directed me to
ask Beijing to reciprocate. On 15 June, PNoy informed me again that he has
ordered the pullout of the 2 remaining PCG (Philippine Coast Guard) ships from
the shoal, citing an incoming typhoon as the reason, and directed me to ask
Beijing to reciprocate.

In other words: Trillanes is negotiating a sequential
withdrawal on behalf of the president of the Philippines.Del Rosario, who has been shut out of the
negotiations, gets a message from the US (apparently a phone call in the middle
of the night from US Ambassador to the Philippines Harry Thomas), orders a
unilateral withdrawal from the shoal without telling his own president, and then
accuses the PRC of violating an agreement for a simultaneous withdrawal.

Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

Tiglao’s web page provides some further information on
the Aide Memoire as excerpted
below.A few points
worth noting:

Bringing Del Rosario up to speed on Trillanes’ efforts
may not have been some of Aquino’s best work.Del Rosario was bitterly opposed to the Trillanes channel:

During Trillanes’ stint as backchannel
negotiator in 2012, there were persistent reports that del Rosario detested the
senator’s role, and had even threatened to resign his post, as he wasn’t
consulted on the matter.

And the feeling was mutual, especially after Del
Rosario intensified his behind-the-scenes fiddling against Trillanes’ efforts:

It
is in the course of his “back-channelling” mission that he concluded that del
Rosario was provoking the Chinese, so much so that an angry Trillanes blurted
out: “He should be shot by firing squad for what he did.”

It looks like Del Rosario leaned in early to sabotage
the talks, even before he disrupted Trillanes’ sequential withdrawal in June.

Despite his knowledge that Aquino was making progress
through Trillanes, Del Rosario also dispatched his own envoy, utility-and-everything
tycoon Manuel V. Pangilinan (known by his initials as “MVP”) to Beijing,
perhaps in an attempt to undercut Trillanes’ role.

MVP and Del Rosario are joined at the hip, both as
business partners and allies in advancing the US-Philippine relationship.Reportedly Del Rosario, now retired from the
MFA, is slated to take on the leadership of a new foreign policy think tank
generously funded by MVP.It is rumored
that MVP is a front man, albeit supremely capable, for the Salim family of
Indonesia in order to disguise its control of various strategic Philippine
industries that are supposed to be indigenously owned. Del Rosario himself is
one of the richest people in the Philippines, perhaps richer than MVP, and it’s
a question who’s dog is wagging whose tail.

In a further gotta-be-Asia complications, one of MVP’s
companies owns the development rights to the undersea hydrocarbon play at Reed
Bank.Reed Bank has been on the agenda
for joint Philippine-PRC development for a dog’s age, but will be a matter of
(relatively) undisputed sole Philippine development rights if the UNCLOS
arbitration goes Manila’s way.In any
case, the PRC’s interest in Reed Bank ensures MVP a high-level reception at
least in the petroleum sector and he can leverage that to claim if not actually
enjoy a privileged capacity as an interlocutor with the PRC on the Philippines.

I’m guessing MVP went to Beijing to tell whoever he
met with that the Philippine Foreign Affairs and Defense ministries were dead
set against Trillanes’ initiative, he was crazy bananas, and even if the
bilateral blows up, no hard feelings, we can still work on Reed Bank together.And his message back to Aquino, hey, we’re
solid with the PRC on Reed Bank, they think Trillanes is crazy bananas, let Del
Rosario handle Scarborough…

Anyway…

According
to Trillanes’ inquiries, after doing his best to blow up the
deal by disrupting the negotiations and then interfering with the early June
withdrawal, Del Rosario apparently planted false news stories in the Philippine
papers to paint a picture of the PRC humiliating the Philippines and turning
potential appeasement over the Scarborough Shoal a matter of hot-button
nationalism.

Trillanes, in his paper, pointed out
that following Aquino’s orders, he had succeeded in his back-channel talks with
Chinese officials, so that they ordered on June 10, 2012 the withdrawal from
the disputed Scarborough Shoal (Bajo de Masinloc on our maps) of their Coastal
Marine Surveillance (CMS) ships and 14 fishing boats. Our two Bureau of Fishing
and Aquatic Resources vessels, as part of the agreement, also left the area.

Nine days later, though, Aquino called
Trillanes to say that they were “betrayed by China.” Aquino referred him to the
Philippine Daily Inquirer’s huge banner-photo which showed Chinese uniformed
personnel holding a Chinese flag on the shoal, with the headline in huge fonts
screaming: “China ships stay on shoal.”

Trillanes in his report wrote that his
Beijing negotiators denied the news story, and pointed out that the photo was
an old one from the 1980s. The senator himself had suspected so, as the photo
had clear blue skies and calm waters as background, when in fact a typhoon was
passing through the area at the time the photo was published.
Trillanes claimed that his contacts in the newspaper told him that the story
and photo came from del Rosario.

According to subsequent reports, the
Chinese ships, both their CMS vessels and the fishing boats, indeed, had left
the shoal, although as Trillanes said in his report, the Chinese would not
announce that this was due to negotiations with the Philippine government. The
official explanation of the foreign ministry was that the ships escorted the
fishing boats to the Chinese mainland to escape an impending typhoon that would
pass over the shoal.

There was a second instance in which
del Rosario planted, Trillanes alleged, a false news story in the Philippine
Daily Inquirer that roused Philippine ire against China:
“On 24 June, the Philippine Daily Inquirer published a story about a Chinese
vessel ramming a Filipino fishing boat. Again, P-Noy called me and he was
furious about this incident. I told him that I would ask Beijing about it. When
I confronted the negotiators, they told me that their ships [were] in place and
that the incident happened in an area that was at least 150 nautical miles
away.

“So I investigated further by sending
somebody to talk to one of the survivors who was then confined in Ilocos Sur.
The survivor said that they were already sinking while tied to a fish marker
and that they were not rammed at all. I then asked around again in the Inquirer
as to who fed the story. My sources then revealed that the story came from Sec.
del Rosario.”

According to Trillanes’ Aide Memoire, the sequential
withdrawal he had negotiated with the PRC was still proceeding in early July,
despite Del Rosario’s multiple efforts to drive a stake in its heart.

The final confrontation came in a cabinet meeting in
early July.The point at issue: whether
to “internationalize” the Scarborough crisis by raising it as a matter for a
joint statement at the upcoming ASEAN Regional Forum, or not.According to Trillanes, if the Philippines
stuck to the bilateral process and didn’t make a fuss at ASEAN, the PRC would
withdraw the last three ships it had in the shoal.

Per Tiglao’s account:

According to Trillanes, he recommended
in an executive Cabinet meeting on July 5 that Aquino adopt a bilateral
approach to resolving the territorial dispute with China, especially that over
the Scarborough Shoal.

He explained that his bilateral talks
with Chinese representatives had resulted in the drastic reduction of Chinese
vessels from almost a hundred to only three.
Trillanes told Aquino that the Chinese made the commitment to pull out the
remaining three CMS vessels if the Philippines does not internationalize it by
raising the issue to the Asean Regional Forum scheduled for July 12. The
Chinese, he said, also assured him that they would not put up any structure
around the shoal.

Del Rosario, however, pushed for
internationalizing the dispute. Trilllanes narrated:

“I clearly remember USec. Henry
Bensurto with a PowerPoint presentation telling everybody in the meeting that
the annexation of Scarborough Shoal by China would be used as a springboard to
claim Western Luzon. Sec. del Rosario proceeded to present that China had
almost 100 vessels in and around the shoal; that they placed a rope at the
entrance of the shoal and the Chinese were duplicitous.”

(“USec Henry Bensurto” was not an
undersecretary but a foreign affairs department assistant secretary heading its
West Philippine Sea Center, and the Secretary-General of the Commission on
Maritime and Ocean Affairs Secretariat.)
“The rope at the entrance of the shoal” del Rosario alleged is sheer nonsense,
a source familiar with Scarborough shoal explained. The “rope” seen by Coast
Guard personnel was a remnant of anchor ropes floating near the entrance of the
shoal.

Trillanes report continued:

“It was at this point that Sen. Juan
Ponce Enrile… raised the ante and proposed on the table that we study the
option of completely cutting ties with China. Sec. del Rosario and Sec.
Almendras followed suit and the discussion went on with NEDA detailing how many
percentage points would be shaved off the GDP; DTI, explaining that the
electronics exports sectors would be gravely affected; and DOLE, saying how
many OFWs would be repatriated, etc.”

It would be interesting to find out why the cabinet
thought the threat of a PRC invasion of western Luzon was real enough to risk
entering an economic and diplomatic deep freeze with the PRC. In any case, at
this point Trillanes’ name was definitely mud through some combination of his
own mis-steps, machinations of his enemies and, I’m guessing, Aquino’s anxiety to
avoid getting painted into the “unpatriotic China appeaser” corner the China
hawks in the media and inside his administration had prepared for him.Del Rosario carried the day:

“In the end, when the vote came in, it was
lopsided in favor of Sec. del Rosario’s option…” (to internationalize it).

Del Rosario took the issue to ASEAN in coordination
with Vietnam and tried to insert an explicit reference to the Scarborough
Shoal/SCS EEZ issues into the final communique.Cambodia resisted, at the PRC’s behest, and as a result of the deadlock
no joint communique was issued for the first time in the 47 years of ASEAN’s
history.

The leaked notes of the ASEAN deliberations found
their way to Carleton Thayer, who prepared a lengthy analysis
for Japan Focus that placed the onus on the PRC and Cambodia.

However, given what we know now of the Philippine
cabinet’s decision to internationalize the dispute, however, it appears more
likely that Del Rosario came to the ASEAN meeting knowing he wouldn’t
compromise and it was just a matter of managing the endgame and the resultant
fallout.

At the end of the meeting, Del Rosario engaged in a
bridge-burning twofer, equating the PRC to Nazi Germany and uncooperative ASEAN
nations to spineless Nazi appeasers.

Del
Rosario argued that China’s actions challenged ASEAN centrality, leadership and
solidarity. The Philippines, as the aggrieved party and one of the founding
members of ASEAN, failed to understand the lack of concern by some other
members and their “seeming silence” on their commitment to the principles of
the DOC, he concluded. Del Rosario then asked rhetorically, "what would be
the real value of the COC if we could not uphold the DOC; in Scarborough Shoal
the DOC is violated?” He stated that it was “important that ASEAN [make a]
collective commitment to uphold the DOC [and this] be reflected in the joint
communiqué of the AMM.”

Finally, Del Rosario concluded his remarks by quoting from
the German anti-Nazi theologian, Martin Neimöller:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade
unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak
out for me.

You see where we’re headed here,
thanks to Del Rosario’s determined efforts.

The Philippine Department of Foreign
Affairs applied an additional eggbeater to troubled waters with this post-ASEAN statement:

“On
the reference to ‘duplicity and intimidation,’ the Philippines forged an
agreement with a neighboring country for the simultaneous pullout of all
vessels inside the shoal, which we undertook in good hfaith on June 4.
Furthermore, the neighboring country agreed to remove its barrier at the
entrance of the shoal.

“Yet to this day, the neighboring country has not fulfilled its obligations
under the agreement and has maintained its ships inside and outside the shoal,
as well as its barrier, in its aim to establish effective control and
jurisdiction in the shoal and surrounding waters.”

In parsing
the DFA statement, recall that 1) the PRC had agreed to a sequential, not
simultaneous pullout and 2) according to Trillanes the “barrier” was a bogus
reference to a piece of rope seen floating in the water at the mouth of the
shoal. In other words, just another of
many layer of public relations BS applied (and I suspect, still applied) to the
Scarborough/SCS issues by the Department of Foreign Affairs.

It’s very hard to argue against the
conclusion that Del Rosario wanted to take the case to international
arbitration and foreclose the options of a Philippine-PRC bilateral or
ASEAN-focused conciliation.Even if it
involved a considerable amount of dirty work.

The only hanging question, in my
opinion, is how much and how early the US pitched in on the dirty work.

When Enrile read the notes of Sonja Brady,
the Philippine ambassador, concerning her recollection of her discussions with
Trillanes in Beijing, it included this account of Trillanes’ observations:

When [Trillanes] got involved it was in the height of the
problem; he had to find out what was happening so he tried to see whether this
was a move of the Americans.He was
suspecting the Americans as involved in the conflict…We are internationalizing
the issue because of Secretary Del Rosario.This is his move…There was never any negotiations between the Chinese
and the Americans, just a meeting with Kurt Campbell.

Trillanes seems to have regarded the
internationalization gambit as the work of his arch-nemesis, Alberto Del
Rosario. He also accused Del Rosario of treason, not because Del Rosario was
working for the United States, but because Del Rosario had been abandoned by
the United States and was recklessly playing a lone hand in favor of internationalization.

Maybe Trillanes believed this, or
maybe he wanted to tout the superior legitimacy of his channel, informal but endorsed
by the president of the Philippines, over that of the Secretary of Foreign
Affairs.

Given the fortuitously misleading
phone call from the US Embassy in June 2012, and the 2014 revelation of the
purported motel breakthrough negotiated by Kurt Campbell with Mdme. Fu Ying,
Del Rosario’s undermining of the Trillanes negotiation through multiple
activities over a period of months…perhaps more was involved than the
unassisted initiative of a decisive, turf-protecting pro-US millionaire at the
Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs ready to defy his president in
executing a personal China policy.

As I wrote at AT:

It is, of course, possible that Kurt Campbell innocently
engaged in some great power diplomacy ignorant of the Trillanes channel and Del
Rosario’s machinations, and the whole thing backfired, so sorry…but even so the
US inadvertently harvested the benefits of the polarization of relations
between the PRC and the Philippines when proponents of the US alliance were
able to push through the “Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement” that signaled
the de facto return of US military forces to Philippine bases 25 years after they
were kicked out.

On the other hand, Del Rosario was an aggressive advocate
for the American relationship, the key phone call that let him torpedo
Trillanes’ sequential withdrawal arrangement came from the US ambassador, and I
find it difficult to believe that the Philippine cabinet would agree to
internationalize the dispute and provoke the PRC without pretty strong
confidence that the USA had its back.

It would make sense for Del Rosario
and the United States to downplay the US role in 2012 in order to strengthen
Del Rosario’s hand as a principled, independent player at ASEAN, and then float
the motel room tale in 2014 to paint the PRC’s actions on Scarborough Shoal as
a breach of trust with the United States, now prepared to escalate its South
China Sea game, as well as the Philippines.

And in 2016 high profile indignation
is the order of the day, now that it may be necessary to finesse the blowback
if Del Rosario’s pro-US initiative ends up with the PRC island building and
permanently alienating the Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines.

I, for one, can visualize an episode
of near-panic in the US State Department in 2012 when Del Rosario warns them
that a bilateral agreement between the Philippines and the PRC—one that would
undercut the entire US pivot narrative that only an internationalized US-led
united front can bring security and stability to the SCS and East Asia—is
looming.Time for bold, determined
action, perhaps, like helping Del Rosario sabotage the sequential withdrawal by
providing him a pretext to order the Philippines ships out of the shoal and
then accuse the PRC of reneging on a vague deal purportedly negotiated in a
motel in Virginia.

This tangled history might also
explain why the Obama administration has been loath, at least until now, to
make a huge deal out of Scarborough Shoal despite the vociferous complaints of
the China hawks.

The question is what did Kurt
Campbell know and when did he know it.I’m guessing: quite a bit and pretty early on.

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